He was born Francois-Marie Arouet in Paris in 1694. His parents were
well-to-do members of the upper middle classes. Young Arouet attended a
fashionable Jesuit academy where he received a thorough grounding in the Latin
and Greek classics. He completed a play, dipus, performed in 1718
with great success, and in the dedication the author first signed his name
"Voltaire." In his early career it was primarily as a playwright that Voltaire
made his reputation among his contemporaries.

At this time too the young writer was to suffer his first experience of
the arbitrary whim of an autocratic government. For eleven months, from 1717 to
1718, he languished in the Bastille in consequence of satiric poetry directed
against the Regent, the Duke of Orleans. On his release he plunged into
literary activity and soon cut a brilliant figure in polite society. His career
was interrupted in 1725 by an open quarrel with an arrogant aristocrat, who
subsequently had Voltaire beaten. To forestall a duel, the authorities
imprisoned Voltaire, and released him only when he offered to leave at once for
England.

Voltaire's English exile lasted from 1726 to 1729. He made the most of
his opportunity, learning English well, and meeting the leading literary
figures of the day  Swift, Pope, Congreve, Bolingbroke, and many others.
He acquired an insight unusual for a foreigner into English traditions and
institutions, and was astonished by the contrast they provided with the French.
Implicitly, Voltaire's Philosophical Letters are a powerful indictment
of the ancien régime; for in praising English law, English
tolerance, English philosophy, science and art, he exposed the weaknesses of
his own society in the light of a superior standard of value. No wonder that
soon after its publication in 1734 the book was condemned by the French
parliament and burned by the hangman in the public square. Yet the
Philosophical Letters is not only a work of combat; Voltaire was genuine
in his praise of Bacon, Newton and Locke, and the impact of British empiricism
is writ large in his philosophical and scientific speculations of the ensuing
years. Like most of the thinkers of his day, Voltaire was filled with
admiration for Newton as that philosopher who reduced Nature to law by
discovering the universally operative causes of natural phenomena. The method
of experimental science, well established by the middle years of the eighteenth
century, played an ever-increasing role in Voltaire's re-examination of the
principles of social morality and his rejection of the most cherished
prejudices of his time. It may well be that in his Philosophical Letters
Voltaire exaggerated the superiority of the English to his countrymen, but his
attitudes and underlying standards of judgment were in many instances to remain
with him for the rest of his life: from the Philosophical Letters to the
Philosophical Dictionary is but a short step.

In 1733 Voltaire met and fell in love with Madame du Châtelet, a
spirited and intelligent woman twelve years his junior. They worked together at
scientific and philosophical investigations, and it was to her chateau at
Cirey, in Lorraine, that Voltaire fled in 1734 after the condemnation of the
Philosophical Letters. It was here that he did much of the wide reading
that was to serve him so well in later years. Drama, satiric poetry, popular
science, metaphysics, history, all belong to the decade of the 1730's, spent
largely at Cirey, and culminating in 1739 with the seizure of the first
chapters of Voltaire's history, The Age of Louis XIV, upon their
publication in Paris.

If Voltaire may be considered the father of modern history, it is
because he was the first to conceive of history as the total interpretation of
the customs and manners of past civilizations. His history was evaluative as
well as descriptive; in his judgment of ancient times his highest praise was
for China and India, and in the west, for Greece and Rome. In modern times he
held that the apogee of civilization was reached in the age of Louis XIV. It is
important to recognize that in taste and temperament, the balanced rationality
and polish of French society in the later seventeenth century represented an
ideal for Voltaire, a glorious epoch whose perfection was embodied in poetry in
the plays of Racine, in literary criticism in the rules of Boileau, in manners
in the court at Versailles, and in government in the benevolent autocracy of
Louis XIV. Voltaire's history is in large part propaganda for a way of life, an
attempt to educate his reader to the ways of the most refined and cultivated of
modern civilizations, seen not in its political and military triumphs, but in
the achievement of its arts and institutions. Voltaire's concern with
institutional and historical forces is altogether unusual in the history of his
day, but it is also noteworthy that he wrote history with a passion for
accuracy, refusing to omit any labor that might help him to obtain and verify
his facts. Particularly after 1745, when Voltaire became Royal Historiographer,
he had access to innumerable private documents and state papers that made
possible a degree of authenticity virtually unknown in histories of the past.
Yet he selected with discrimination and arranged his material so as to compel
the reader's attention by the liveliness of his narrative and the precision of
his language. Voltaire is one of the masters of historical style, an artist and
a social philosopher in the same instant that he is recorder and interpreter of
facts and their consequences.

By 1745 Voltaire was a famous man in the eyes of his con- temporaries.
The following year he was elected to the French Academy, and he did not scruple
to insure his success by dedicating a play to the Pope. Duplicity with Voltaire
was an important element of literary strategy. If at times he seems to
contradict himself, to lie, conceal, or play a double game, it is because
Voltaire the public man was often a very different writer from Voltaire the
intimate correspondent. His newly won favor at court, under the sponsorship of
Madame de Pompadour, was important; almost at once he received royal titles and
commissions, and honors on all hands. In retrospect, we can see that the years
of fame lay ahead of him. If Voltaire had died in his early fifties, it is not
likely that we should consider him today as more than a minor literary figure
of the early eighteenth century. Voltaire would no doubt be astounded to learn
that it is primarily by his fiction that he survives in literature. The
publication of his short stories and nouvelles, beginning with Zadig in
1747, belongs to the latter part of his career.

Zadig and Candide are by common consent the best of Voltaire's tales,
yet it is sometimes forgotten that he wrote over twenty-five fictional
compositions; many of these are waiting to be rediscovered. Voltaire's
contes belong to a narrative form characteristic of the eighteenth
century, the philosophical tale, best represented in English literature by
Samuel Johnson's moral fable, Rasselas, or William Beckford's
extravaganza, Vathek, first written in French and remarkably close in
style to the manner of Voltaire. From Montesquieu and from imitators of the
recently translated Arabian Nights, from Swift and other writers of
voyages imaginaires, Voltaire learned the art of exposing and satirizing
contemporary abuses through allegory, parody, or burlesque. A recurrent figure
in the contes philosophiques is the wise, objective, and impartial
commentator, usually an oriental sage, whose experiences and reflections serve
to unmask the follies and vices of the times. Voltaire's tales are intensely
topical, far more than most present-day readers can realize, for the mask and
the disguise are implicit within the very structure of the story. Yet what in
other writers was merely low gossip or pornography or flat travel narrative
became in the hands of Voltaire an incisive weapon for the analysis of
philosophical argument. Zadig (from the Arabic Saadiq, meaning
"the truthful one") is essentially an examination of the impact of destiny on
human affairs, of the conflict and confluence of fate and chance, the ordained
and the fortuitous, the constrained and the free. The hero is a philosopher in
quest of happiness, yet he is made to endure cruel persecutions at the hands of
vicious men. Each chapter of Voltaire's tale provides yet one more example of
human pettiness and meanness or stupidity. The climax of the narrative comes in
the hermit's demonstration of human insufficiency: the inevitability of evil
and suffering in a world of crime and misfortune. Yet Zadig does not end by
submitting to the bleak fatalism the hermit would impose in accordance with the
immutable decrees of Providence. Zadig's final and unanswered "But" carries
with it a protest in the name of suffering humanity against the injustice of
man's lot, and the eventual good fortune of Voltaire's hero is to some degree
an optimistic qualification of the hermit's harsh assertion of the littleness
of man amid the immensity of the universe.

Candide, Voltaire's masterpiece, appeared in 1759, twelve years
after Zadig. It is unquestionably darker in implication, more ferocious
in its satire and irony than the earlier work. Voltaire maintains the same
variety of incident and rapidity of pace, but the setting is the Western world
which we know, given extension by Voltaire's bold manipulation of the
picaresque pattern. Candide himself is no rogue but a naive and good-hearted
fellow, uneducated in the ways of the world. Those he meets are virtually
without exception knaves or dupes: his education is our education; his achieved
wisdom becomes that of the reader, to serve as a practical means of enduring a
life that is at best painful and difficult. The shallow optimism Voltaire
attributes to Leibnitz is an easy target and in the grotesque caricature of
Doctor Pangloss, an amusing one as well; but it is with the man-made causes of
human evil  that is, that part of evil which man can ameliorate 
that Voltaire is primarily concerned. Lisbon may be reduced to dust by
earthquake, but this is an event wholly beyond man's control and to be borne as
best we can. Most human ills are derived from institutions and from the ways of
man himself: hereditary privilege, war, the aristocracy, the church, the
Jesuits, slavery, savage self-interest, all provide the most desperate evidence
in support of Martin's view that God has abandoned this globe  or globule
 to some evil creature. Candide ends without embracing this black
pessimism, but he agrees completely with Martin's insistence on work without
theorizing as the only way to make life endurable. To cultivate our garden, we
must direct our attention to that which it is in our power to improve.
Voltaire's conclusion should not be taken as a defense of quiescence or of
indifference to the plight of humanity. All the world, he asserts, is our
garden; let us work to make it better than it is.

As he approached the age of sixty, a fundamental change began to take
place within Voltaire; more and more he felt impelled to enter into the battle
between enlightenment and oppression that he saw waged daily around him. It was
in 1752, during the unfortunate period of attachment to his friend and
fellow-philosopher, Frederick the Great, that Voltaire conceived the plan of
his Philosophical Dictionary. This project was to occupy him
intermittently for the ensuing twenty years. Firmly established in an
environment where he could work unhampered by persecution from church or state,
first in 1755 at "Les Délices" near Geneva, and then, more securely,
after 1759, at Ferney, in French territory but just outside the Swiss frontier,
Voltaire set out more boldly than ever to crusade on behalf of humanity and
justice. Such events of the 1760's as the torture of Calas, the condemnation of
Sirven, and the execution of La Barre aroused in him an almost pathological
indignation. In the last decades of his life Voltaire's irritability literally
goaded him into action against the intolerance and persecuting spirit of his
countrymen. He responded with a fanaticism of his own that drove him to
inundate France and the rest of Europe with tracts, sermons, pamphlets,
satires, diatribes and denunciations of every description. Much of this writing
is propaganda of a local and immediate character, far more journalistic than
literary. Yet even in calmer years, the journalist and the man of letters were
never far apart in Voltaire's activity. His scientific and philosophical
writings are essentially essays in popularization; and if he discovered few
facts, he knew how to assimilate the discoveries of others and to make them
accessible to the ordinary reader. He designed the Philosophical
Dictionary as a little book, to be carried in the pocket as a work of ready
reference, in sharp contrast with the massive effort of Diderot's
Encyclopedia, an enterprise which Voltaire admired and supported, but
which he felt was paid for at too great a price in the absorption of Diderot's
energies. Yet he did not spare himself when he came to the same task of
enlightening his countrymen, of proclaiming the necessity of freedom of thought
and of expression at a time when intolerance and censorship seemed to be
gaining renewed strength. It is to Voltaire's credit that no external pressure
or private interest obliged him to take up the defense of Jean Calas. That so
barbarous a deed as the torture of Calas on the wheel by the religious fanatics
of Toulouse could occur in a supposedly civilized nation outraged and
infuriated Voltaire and incited him to action. His Treatise on
Tolerance, written in the heat of his attempts to rehabilitate Calas,
served to alert all Europe to the dangers of bigotry and fanaticism. So long as
these dangers persist, Voltaire's eloquent essay will command our attention.
His "Prayer to God" transmutes his angry prose into impassioned poetry, for it
offers not simply a denunciation of intolerance and religious hatred, but a
positive assertion of human brotherhood and the essential dignity of all
men.

In his hatred of cruelty and his essential love of mankind, Voltaire is
in the forefront of a spiritual revolution that is yet far from won. Men still
cry out for enlightenment, and the "infamous" are always with us. The Nazis
melted down Voltaire's statue in Paris during the occupation. Others, more
subtle in their efforts to enslave men's minds, are forever challenging the
premises of individual liberty and human dignity which are our heritage as free
men. Voltaire knew that the struggle against barbarism and inhumanity is the
enduring price of civilization.